Assessing ‘alarm-based CN’ earthquake predictions in Italy

The quantitative assessment of the performance of earthquake prediction and/or forecast models is essential for evaluating their applicability for risk reduction purposes. Here we assess the earthquake prediction performance of the CN model applied to the Italian territory. This model has been widely publicized in Italian news media, but a careful assessment of its prediction performance is still lacking. In this paper we evaluate the results obtained so far from the CN algorithm applied to the Italian territory, by adopting widely used testing procedures and under development in the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) network. Our results show that the CN prediction performance is comparable to the prediction performance of the stationary Poisson model, that is, CN predictions do not add more to what may be expected from random chance. © 2016 by the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia. All rights reserved.